Schrullenhaft, HELP!! Monitor resolution problem.

[Agua]

Man, I need your help, or anyone else really. I just got a used 21" monitor that was part of an equipment lease program. It is a Sony Ultrascan 1600 something or other and it was manufactured for Dell. Dell identifies it as a D 1626HT (I think). I am running Windows ME.

Anyway, when I initially install it, everything looks fine, except for every application I try out, including the desktop itself, the very top portion of the application will not display, although the screen will fill up the entire viewing area of the monitor. I'm talking about things such as the "minimize", "maximize" and "close" buttons on the top of windows and all windows based applications.

Okay, so I go to a support page and it recommends for that size monitor, that I set the resolution to 1600 x 1200. I do this and as concerns web browsers, the top portion of the applications are now visible, but everything is TINY AS HELL.

Okay, now with the computer set at 1600 x 1200 resolution, I remove the CM "preferences" file, and when I start CM, the screen goes black for only a second, then starts up (without any dialog boxes concerning resolution or anything else). It appears to have the same problem with non-display of the top portion of the screen that was present with everything else prior to setting the resolution to the higher level. Despite all my tweaking with the controls on the monitor for "zoom", "size", "center", as well as tweaking with a "center" adjustment in the "display" portion of the "control panel" in windows, there is still a small portion of CM at the very top which just won't display. It comes into play as actually mattering when I try to do a QB and the button at the top which says "okay" isn't displayed. I can goof around, blindly, and hit it, eventually, but I say this only in the hopes of conveying the situation to you as to the problem.

Windows ME indicates that I have the latest driver for the monitor.

What am I doing wrong and what do I need to do?

[Schrullenhaft]

What video card do you have ? I can only guess that somehow the display has set the top of the image too high and it is getting cut off by the bezel. With some monitors there are two sets of centering controls - one for the raster and the other for the image. Few monitors have the raster controls anymore (especially with digital-based controls), but large, expensive monitors in the past usually had these controls as a service adjustment (raster centering).

This is the document I found at Dell for the monitor's controls, but you may have already read it.

Dell D1626 HT Monitor Controls:

http://docs.us.dell.com/docs/monitors/55347/controls.htm

For your problem I can only guess that you need to adjust the vertical size and then the vertical centering. You can also press the "autosize and centering" button and see what results you get (if you haven't done this already). With some resolutions this doesn't work very well and manual adjustment may be necessary or more optimal. But it sounds as if you may have tried all of this already.

Your CM specific problem is strange and I'm not sure what that answer to that would be since if you don't click on anything the resolution process should cycle until you get a DirectX error (since there are no further resolutions to try out that DirectX recognizes).

1600 x 1200 @ 85Hz is the maximum resolution (and the maximum corresponding refresh for that resolution) that this monitor will support. It isn't necessary to run your monitor at this resolution, especially if it appears too small for you. The following table lists resolutions and refresh rates that should directly correspond to presets in the monitor. 1280 x 1024 @ 85Hz is probably a good resolution or even 1024 x 768 @ 85Hz if that's too high.

D1626HT Specs:

http://docs.us.dell.com/docs/monitors/55347/specs.htm

Outside of this, your monitor may need to be serviced from your description of the problem. There is a service mode to larger, digitally-controlled monitors, but there may be no way for an end user to access this (some of the service modes require very expensive, specialized adjustment hardware from the monitor OEM). As I mentioned earlier this may be a case of the raster being too high and the image being laid down in it also being too high as a result.

This monitor is equivalent to the Sony GDM-5001PT (for what this is worth). I've seen wholesale ads on the 'Net at US$270 for this Dell monitor.

[Agua]

Thanks!!

I did review that user / spec sheet document. I have done all the tweaking that the monitor controls themselves allow. The video card is a 64mb nVidia Geforce2 Ultra.

That info on the sony equivalent may well come in handy as whenever I gave support reps the Dell model number, they quickly responded it wasn't supported and I needed a GDP or whatever model number for them to be able to assist me.